Veteran right-hander Sonny Gray’s first season with the Cardinals has come to a close, as the club has placed him on the 15-day injured list due to flexor tendonitis in his right forearm. Right-hander Kyle Leahy was recalled to replace Gray on the big league roster, and rookie Michael McGreevy is currently slated to take Gray’s place in the rotation as noted by Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat.
Gray, 34, joined the Cardinals after signing a three-year, $75MM deal with the club on the heels of a dominant 2023 season that saw him post an MLB-best 2.83 FIP as a member of the Twins and finish second in AL Cy Young award voting to Yankees ace Gerrit Cole. Gray’s start to the season was slightly delayed by injury but he started strong overall, with a 2.60 ERA and 2.84 FIP in his first nine starts with the club that made it look as though Gray might be able to deliver more of the dominance that he flashed in Minnesota with St. Louis this year.
The results have left something to be desired for Gray ever since the calendar flipped to June, however, as he posted a 4.92 ERA in a 15-start stretch from early June to late August before managing to finish the season strong with a 2.55 ERA and 1.91 FIP in his final four starts of the year. That leaves him with a relatively pedestrian 3.84 ERA overall in 166 1/3 innings of work, though the underlying metrics suggest he’s been a good bit better than that. After all, even that aforementioned stretch of 15 starts where Gray struggled saw him post a solid enough 3.63 FIP while striking out an excellent 29.3% of his opponents. Looking at his full season stats, he’ll end the year with a 3.13 FIP that ranks seventh-best in the majors, a 30.3% strikeout rate that’s tied with Tarik Skubal for the second-best figure in the big leagues behind likely NL Cy Young award winner Chris Sale, and 3.8 fWAR that’s good for seventh-most among NL pitchers this year.
Unfortunately, those promising peripheral numbers neither translated to elite production on the field for Gray nor wins for a Cardinals club that was recently eliminated from playoff contention and has a 77-77 record with eight games left to go in the regular season. With that being said, those strong underlying numbers do provide reason for optimism that better days ought to be ahead for the veteran in the future. That’s good news for fans in St. Louis, as Gray is sure to be a key fixture of the club’s starting five next year. As noted by Jones, Gray underwent an MRI recently that came back clean and would likely still be pitching if the Cardinals remained in the playoff hunt. That makes it seem unlikely that Gray’s current ailment will have any sort of impact on him when camp opens up for Spring Training next year.
Looking ahead to 2025, Gray figures to anchor a rotation that seems likely to include deadline addition Erick Fedde, veteran innings eater Miles Mikolas, and youngster Andre Pallante but still features some uncertainty due to the fact that the club holds team options on the services of both Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn for next year. While both veterans have been perfectly serviceable back-end arms for the Cardinals this year, with the aforementioned quartet and Steven Matz all expected to return in 2025 it would hardly be a shock to see the club decline the options of one or both players in search of an upgrade to either the rotation or lineup elsewhere on the market.
As for replacing Gray in the short term, Leahy returns to the club’s roster as a multi-inning relief option after posting a 4.02 ERA and 3.62 FIP in 47 innings of work earlier this year. Meanwhile, McGreevy made his big league debut in a spot start back in July and impressed with seven innings of one-run ball and currently sports a 0.90 ERA in ten innings at the big league level along with a 4.02 ERA in 27 starts at Triple-A this year.
To many curves
You met his wife ?
3.84 ERA is relatively pedestrian? Very weird when MLBTR will often say someone with a mid 4s ERA is “solid”.
do you know who sonny gray is? good pitcher. when you compare to his career, an era of 3.84 IS (key word here) relatively, pedestrian. looking at his secondary numbers, you might infer that he should have fared a bit better than the way it actually played out this year. the word choice makes sense when in congruence with context, which i have hence provided for you even though it was all in the article.
I would have acknowledged your argument if you didn’t go all “thesaurus boy” at the end. Actually you looked like a try hard throughout. Smell ya, nerd.
Coming from doodoo your opinion is not valued not even by you. Wish we could downvote your doodoo takes
You could just mute me, but it seems you are lying to yourself. You actually love my doodoo takes. You want to drink deep from my well.
-Carl Winslow
I see you voted for yourself
With 15 days remaining in the season, why are teams doing this? What is the purpose? There’s too many players put on the IL today to not think there’s some reason.
They come off the 28-man roster, allowing the team to bring up another player for the last few days of the season. Makes even more sense with the minor league season ending in the next couple days.
Well, at least the Cardinals aren’t going to the playoffs with Gray injured lol.
Cardinals have too many mediocre pitchers to be a dominant team. Without at least two, preferably three dominant pitchers, you are not making it to the playoffs, let alone go very deep into the playoffs.
Depends on how good and deep a teams bullpen is.
MLB is now all about bullpens. Last I saw it the average start is around 5-1/3’rd innings.
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Top heavy teams can make it to the expanded playoffs. But they don’t go far in them – witness the Dodgers and Yankees over recent years.
The guy was 13-9 with a 3.84 ERA and 203 strikeouts, I wish my team had someone like that even if they left something to be desired.
The strikeouts are nice but he gave up 4 runs a game and was a 4 game above 500 pitcher. Seems the guy breaks down often. 13 and 9 wow !
13-9 in 1986 may not have been all that great. But in 2024, only 4 pitchers in the entire National League have more wins than Gray;s 13. I know the term “wins” is almost a dirty word around here, but if you are 5th in the league in ANYTHING positive, you haven’t had a bad season.
13-9 is pathetic in 1886 1986 and any way you cut it. It’s says more about the lack of talent at the mlb level than it does about sonny gray and his 13 wins . Sonny Gray is a relief pitcher in 1986.
A win loss record says nothing about the lack of talent in ANY year because there are always the same number of wins and losses each year. If you add up the W/L record of every pitcher in the league that year, it will always be .500. That being said, a winning record is good a losing record is bad.
You seem to think that if a player is not in the top 5 in Cy Young Award voting, then they aren’t good. I disagree.
I think a pitcher who can’t go 6, gives up 4 and is barely a 500 pitcher doesn’t qualify as much more than a 4 in my rotation.
Gray maybe wasn’t quite as good as hoed but not bad either. Yea no reason to push him now. Let’s see McGreevy or some others can do final week. Mikolas needs to have arm fatigue and get Graceffo or maybe Thompson up to make a start
Too many strike outs